Can social media grow in a recession?
As our economy tries to maintain a clumsy balance between underspending and overspending in order to remain afloat, we have seen cuts made to a multitude of IT budgets. Rising costs for production due to increased oil prices and a wary near-election society add to spending cuts and budget slashing in just about all areas except for data storage.
With an unemployment rate of 6.1%, the continued growth of disk storage systems may seem a bit out of place. Consider this though, with an increasingly unstable economy we are seeing more and more people turn to start ups like those in the Web 2.0 community. These businesses are housed almost entirely on the Internet and somewhere out in that vast Web are the storage facilities that keep all of that priceless data safe.
Information is (or has?) becoming our currency and the need to store and protect this valuable resource will only increase. Vendors such as Dell, EMC and IBM continued to show strong growth this last year with EMC reaching 20 percent. This has positive implications for the social media sphere as we are watching the direct consequence of investments into application companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn positively reflecting on these storage company’s bottom lines.
Keeping an eye on the NASDAQ profiles of businesses such as these is a great way to judge the growth of Web 2.0.
Tags: Social Media Marketing